ARC and North Coast overlap for exactly eight hours a day

On Wednesday we wrote that North Coast Music Festival and ARC Music Festival run the same days in the same metro with one artist in common out of 283, and that the question actually worth asking — whether the sets clash by the hour — could not be answered, because neither had published set times.

Both have now. The answer is that there is very little left to ask.

The same eight hours, three days running

ARC has posted 96 sets across four stages. North Coast has posted 125 across seven.

Both open at 14:00 local, every day, without exception. ARC closes at 22:00, every night, without exception — Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, four nights, the same minute each time.

That makes the overlap on each shared day exactly 480 minutes. Not approximately eight hours. Eight hours, three days in a row.

So there is no daytime seam — no afternoon at one and evening at the other, because the afternoons are the same afternoon. Anyone holding both wristbands is not choosing between artists. They are choosing between festivals, once a day, at 14:00.

The seam is 268 minutes, and it runs one way

North Coast plays past ARC's close on all three shared days: 119 minutes on Friday, 119 on Saturday, 30 on Sunday. That is 268 minutes — the entire window across the weekend in which one festival is live and the other is dark.

It runs in one direction only. ARC first, North Coast after. There is no hour anywhere in the weekend when the reverse is true.

What sits in that window is worth the trip on paper. Friday it is FISHER, 22:25 to 23:59, the last set of the night and the 19th most booked artist in our records at 69 festival dates. Saturday it is GRiZ, 22:45 to 23:59. Sunday's tail is only half an hour, and the set in it — ILLENIUM B2B SLANDER, 21:15 to 22:30 — starts before ARC closes, so it is the one you would arrive in the middle of.

The schedule cannot tell you the rest of it. Union Park is in the West Loop; SeatGeek Stadium is in Bridgeview, a different municipality to the southwest. Whether that trip fits between a 22:00 close and a 22:25 downbeat is a traffic question, and we have the times, not the traffic.

ARC's answer to the collision is Monday

ARC runs a fourth day. North Coast does not.

Monday 7 September is 25 sets with nothing competing, and ARC has put its biggest touring name there: Green Velvet B2B Josh Baker closing The Grid from 20:30 to 22:00. He is the only artist on ARC's grid inside the Most Booked top 25 — 10th, at 79 festival dates — and he is playing the one day of the weekend when the other festival is shut.

North Coast's six top-25 names are all spent on the three contested days.

The two grids want different things from you

ARC's median set is 90 minutes, and 75 of its 80 stage changeovers are exactly zero — one set ends, the next begins the same minute, no dead air on any stage. Four stages, long sets, stand still.

North Coast's median set is 60 minutes across seven stages, 34 of its 104 changeovers carry a five to fifteen minute gap, and Saturday at 20:00 has twelve sets running simultaneously. ARC's densest hour has eight.

One schedule is built for committing to a room for an hour and a half. The other assumes you are moving the whole time and gives you the walking minutes to do it. That is the same split the lineups showed on Wednesday — house and techno against a seven-stage bass bill — expressed in minutes instead of names.

They land in the same place on one measure. Both bury exactly 38 sets: sets wholly contained inside a longer set on another stage, with no partial-catch option available at all.

Tickets

Ticket links below are affiliate links.

• ARC Music Festival — tickets via Front Gate

North Coast sells from its own site rather than through a seller we link, so the event page above is the place to start for it.

Computed on 14 August 2026 from the published set times on both event pages — 96 ARC sets and 125 North Coast sets, every one carrying a start and an end — and from the Most Booked board. Times are converted to Chicago local. Set times move, and late additions are normal; the event pages above are the versions that update.

Electric State is free on the App Store, on Google Play, and at electricstate.app — set times, lineups and the boards this post is computed from.

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